A bogus story about Nazi sex dolls from 2005 or before has surfaced again…and it’s ladling out the dopamine with lots of croutons. And, dopamine-drunk, the blogosphere keeps reposting it.

A report in the New York Daily News references as fact the urban legend that during the Nazi occupation of France, The high command sent sex dolls to keep German soldiers away from French prostitutes. Unfortunately, the story’s been debunked in German sources several times — not definitively, maybe, but the story smells like bullshit in the first place. There was never any good indication that iwas true; the evidence for it was so sketchy as to be laughable to begin with. Plus, in net terms it’s as old as the hills. And the burden of proof is really on the people claiming that the Nazis did create military sex dolls…not those of us suggesting that maybe they didn’t. That hasn’t stopped the news from being reported by every military nerd site out there, with, apparently, nobody expressing any skepticism.

Donald claims he “uncovered” this story while researching a book on Barbie, which he claims was based on a post-World War II German sex doll…another oft-repeated legend that is at best a one-quarter truth. Barbie was based on Bild Lilli, which was originally marketed in immediate postwar Germany to G.I.’s and adults as an adult novelty, and only later marketed to children. But Lilli was not a “sex doll” in the sense that a blow-up doll or a Realdoll is. The myth that Lilli was a sex doll per se seems to have originated with Eve Ensler, who has called her a “sex toy” repeatedly in interviews, and she was referred to by Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs as a “sex doll.” Lilli was neither. She may have been an adult novelty, but she was not a sex toy or a sex doll.

Anyway, the current Nazi Sex Toy story goes like this: In 1940, Heinrich Himmler was just as concerned about sexually transmitted diseases as was the U.S. military. Hitler personally approved “The Borghild Project,” a program to create sex dolls for the Western front, and Himmler “ordered 50” for his troops.

The dolls were — of course — blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and were (presumably deflated) small enough to fit in a backpack. The program was supposedly 86’ed because soldiers were afraid they would “face enormous embarrassment if caught by the enemy with the dolls.”

Incidentally, for future dictators: that is one of the first signs that the war is not going your way — if your personnel are making plans to hide their sex toys before they surrender. I’m told by reliable sources that Sadaam Hussein finally decided to go into hiding when his Revolutionary Guard was spotted stashing their Big Bertha Butt Plugs under the bathroom sink alongside the sarin shells for the Project Babylon supercannon. And when Castro entered Havana gleefully waving Fulgencio Batista’s captured Doc Johnson Super Ballsy? That’s when the world knew it was all over.